it's just the start of everything, if you want
by but we lost ourselves
Summary: a manhattan-style clashing of dreamers, coffee drinkers, fairytale-chasers, and candy cane preferences. or: the one where zach's a cheeky barista and cammie doesn't know what to do with her socially awkward self. part one of some sort of love letter to new york.


_A/N: This is a mess of late night procrastination. Of temporarily abandoning my thesis and my sanity. It doesn't make much sense, but then again, things I write rarely do, so you probably know the drill by now. Reviews would be lovely. Much love, Inez._

Practice makes perfect, they say. And she? She was quite the master.

It came on slowly, her interest in weaving stories. They came naturally, an exhale on her breath that tripped over itself on the way out the first time and had tumbled gracefully ever since.

Her every word was an elaborate tale; even the simplest of phrases was said with the intent of a thousand meanings, and no statement was ever too outlandish for her experience—at least, not for her storytelling experience.

She had a habit of creating these sorts of things for herself, and was under the guise that it was no different than the way movies created different worlds for their viewers. Her creations were her experiences, because she had been there, at least in mind, and fully in spirit.

And most days, this was enough.

She was a waiflike thing, both in appearance and personality, and had the tendency to trip over things like park benches and the sidewalk and grass and her two left feet. She was a tiny slip of a girl, but her hair was anything if not massive. People pretended for most of her life that it balanced her out. When she went to college, she learned a lesson in layers and mousses and bought her first ever straightening iron, which pressed her personality into something neat and tidy and overwhelmingly flat and fake.

She liked to pretend she was carefree, but she wasn't. She liked to believe she wasn't lonely, but she found herself at the corner table for two in the corner coffee shop, only one, sipping a peppermint latte and trying to pretend like her sketches were the most important thing in the world.

It was the fourth anniversary of her father's death, and she wouldn't think about it. He was on a grand adventure, perhaps on the Pirate Ship Revenge, or battling the White Witch, or discovering the tombs of pharaohs. He was not in that navy casket, six feet below cold New Hampshire dirt.

She pressed a stroke too firmly and marred the iris she was highlighting, cursed under her breath and then began a geometric pattern that she'd meant to do all along.

"That's an… interesting concept, you've got going there."

It was the boy who wouldn't leave her alone again—the one who always asked her what he could get her, if she wanted more peppermint to her latte, if she would like a scone, on the house—the one with the green eyes that asked her on dates to the movies and the new show on Broadway and to his family's house on Cape Cod for Christmas dinner.

She'd say no, of course.

"Thanks, it's for this avant garde thing we've got going at the gallery right now," she muttered, because maybe this would be in a gallery someday. Maybe she'd pitch a whole collection of geometrically-overlaid eyes to that professor who kept mentioning something about _'someday you'll_ have _to sell your work so that you can eat.'_

"Ah, a gallery?" The boy—no, he was definitely a man, she admitted, as she observed him through her eyelashes in the least-flirtatious way possible—propped himself up against the empty seat across from her. He looked like he planned on staying a while.

Maybe he'd want to take her to _Hamilton_. She'd been wanting to see that one, anyway, but tickets were just so expensive and finals had been looming for such a while now.

"Yeah, it's a trendy sort of thing in SoHo. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe you haven't," she ducked her head, and he pulled out the seat and plopped into it, leaning with an arm hooked over it's back, precarious on two legs.

"You're going to kill yourself."

"You're awfully ambiguous for someone who has work in a gallery. Don't you want people to buy your stuff?"

"It's not stuff, it's art. You can't afford it," she slashed across the bridge of the drawing's nose, then made the end into the beginnings of a peony, because it seemed realistic at the moment.

"I once knew a guy who killed himself in a chair. He was leaning back about like you are, then when he fell, one of the rungs of the chair's back splintered off and stabbed him straight through the heart."

"Yeah, I don't think that's how gravity or ribcages work," he said, leaning forward with a _crack_ onto the old hardwood. She was sure he'd split something or another. "Why do you think that I can't afford art?"

"You work at the crappiest coffee shop in Manhattan. The only people who come here are either desperate, clueless, or starving artists," she looked around. "That guy over there has been working on the same sketch for two months. It's of a lemur and a pocket watch."

"You're awfully evasive, you know," he tapped his coffee cup against the counter. It was a dull sound. He offered her another candy cane.

"A lemur _stealing_ a pocket watch."

"I think you have some sort of complex. Take the candy cane."

"My father told me not to take candy from strangers."

"I give you candy canes every day. Anyway, maybe he can't get the stripes right."

"What?"

"The lemur."

"It doesn't have stripes."

"All lemurs have stripes."

"It's art. It's not supposed to make sense."

"Then you must be art, yourself."

She rolled her eyes as she finally looked up. "Is that some sort of pickup line?"

"No."

"Then what does that even mean?"

He smirked, looked out the window and watched a little old man in a tour group cursing a hot dog vendor. "That means I'll take my coffee with a side of candy cane girl who actually says what she feels, not what she wants me to think."

She sat for a while then, not sure what to say. She had a million and seven stories on her lips, waiting to push their way out, desperate to fill the space with some sound that would make her feel a little bit less insignificant.

"When I was seven, my dad drove us down to the Cape for the Fourth of July, and my brother got his finger pinched off by a crab." It came out, involuntary, and she almost immediately wished she could shove it back in. Mostly because that sentence had actual truth to it, and that meant that he was getting to her, this boy-man with the green eyes and the Cheshire Cat smile.

"Really? Clawed it clean through?"

"We carried it to the hospital in a sand pail full of ice. The doctor sewed it back on, but it's crooked. He's fine."

"Is that why you eat candy canes? They remind you of bloody, sewn-crooked brotherly fingers?"

"Anyway, he couldn't type effectively for years."

He looked at her for a long while then, like he couldn't decide whether he wanted to burst out laughing or have her committed to a psych ward.

"I have a seven-fingered uncle."

 _That_ wasn't what she was expecting. She paused in her creation of a daisy. "A what?"

"A seven-fingered uncle. Well, seven full-fingered uncle. He has two others, but they're missing after the first knuckle."

She shot him a look that was something like unamused disbelief and tried not to notice his muscular arms beneath his long-sleeved Yale baseball shirt, and tried to fight the urge to tell him to buy a brush for that hair.

"He sliced them off working in a factory in Detroit, but when I was little, he always told me a squirrel ate them."

She nearly lost her sip of latte in an extraordinary effort to not guffaw. She managed to only crack a smirk of a smile, and was proud. Laughing would give him too much confidence, and she still mostly wanted him to just go away.

"I was scared of squirrels for years. Still am, if I'm being honest. I have dreams about giant mutant squirrels."

She gave up and ripped the plastic off of the candy cane, shoving it into her mouth so that nothing would shove its way out. The peppermint was the real kind, with the real stripes that didn't taste like food coloring and belly aches.

Her whole world smelled like coffee beans and Christmas, and a hint of whatever cologne this guy was wearing, and she could have curled up in one of the big chairs by the fireplace and fallen asleep if he would just decide to actually do his job.

" _Nightmares._ "

She snorted. She couldn't help it. She tried her best to make it sound as graceful and exasperated as possible, but really, it just sounded more like a disgruntled horse than anything else.

"I once had a horse," he said, a twinkle in his eye. She didn't like that he seemed to like to read her mind, and she glared at his leg as it slung out, precariously close to her own.

"You and every other trust fund baby at Yale," she sniped, and hoped that that one would shut him up, make him go away, leave her in peace to brood and try to inhale any last bit of her dad from his favorite sweater that was swallowing her whole.

"That was a low blow for a girl who seems to have an appreciation for a good story."

"I do. It was. Go away."

"Ouch. My lattes that bad, huh?"

"No, it's the candy canes," she lied. It was the way he was looking at her, like he knew that she had no gallery in SoHo, no purpose to her ruined drawing, no direction for her steadily sinking ship of a life. "You get the kind in individual wrapping."

He grinned then, and unlikely and extraordinarily white flash of kind eyes and curious satisfaction. "Oh, those are the ones the boss buys. I get mine at Schmidts, preferably, but Economy on a bad day."

"You from Queens?"

"Do I look like I'm from Queens?"

" _Touche_."

"So what's your story, Candy Cane?" Somehow, another had materialized, and he'd popped it in his mouth with a certain amount of glee that could only be described as righteous curiosity.

"Narnia. I prefer _The Horse and His Boy_ , but _The Magician's Nephew_ will do in a pinch."

"So you show up here every day, order a peppermint lattes, even in June, and sit in this corner table, staring out the window like you've lost a piece of your soul. Sometimes you draw. Sometimes you pretend to do crosswords before frustration sets in and you give them to George with the lemur _stealing_ a pocket watch."

"It's December. 'Tis season for peppermint lattes. Are you stalking me?" She said this to have something at all to say, because he was hitting dangerously close to some truth she knew she'd never admit to even herself.

"It's hard not to notice you when you're bringing the mood of the whole place down."

"Why are you here, anyway? Isn't the Yale baseball team missing your pitching arm, or something?"

"Second base, actually. Are all of your comebacks below the belt?"

"Do you always hit on lonely girls at doubles tables when you should be mopping up spilled coffee?"

His grin was wicked, and she wished she'd never said anything at all. Maybe this was a woven story that should have been edited out of the afternoon.

"Ah, Candy Cane. I think you've grossly misinterpreted me. I don't currently have time for the wiles of romance."

"Let me guess. You're a starving writer. Not writer. Novelist. You're working on a novel about a majestic land that's half rip off of Lord of the Rings, half rip off of Avatar." She closed her sketchbook with the definitive _pop_ of someone done with a conversation five minutes ago.

"You jot fantastical ideas of epic battles and floating island nations between innings and latte orders, or sometimes as you're sitting in traffic in the Bronx, making your two hour commute to, what, the greatest barista job in all of the tri-state area?"

"You wound me, Candy Cane."

"You disgust me, Yale. Get back to work."

She'd never thrown her things into her bag so quickly, and she'd probably regret it later, as she was pulling loose, crumpled sketches out from between lip balm and tampons and a ratty copy of _Kisses from Katie_.

"You don't know anything about me. We don't know anything about each other. We really shouldn't be so judgmental."

He stood, behind her in a flash, helping her shrug into her peacoat, and it would have been chivalrous had it not been so annoying and had he not been a good foot taller than her. His muscles were bigger up close, and he smelled better. Something like dark chocolate and coffee beans, cedar and male. She coughed as his fingers brushed her neck, drawing her hair out from her collar.

"I don't appreciate you being so handsy."

"I don't appreciate you leaving so abruptly."

Her eyes held his, staring long and hard into green frosted in too-long eyelashes, glancing inadvertently at lips too naturally blushed for their own good. This was the first wrinkle, she'd find, months, even years later, as she looked back on those moments in her life so defining and sharply in a midst of hazy days. It was the domino to fall in a chain that would create her life.

"I once met my soulmate in Ireland," she said, because now he was looking at her lips and the curl of hair had fallen into her eyes again, an accepted invitation for him to twirl.

"Yeah?"

"His name was Liam. He was an English teacher for whatever the Irish equivalent of high school is." She averted her gaze past his arm, out the window, where a new little old man was yelling at the same hot dog vendor.

"We were on a bus from Killarney to Dublin, and shared the last of a cup of really shoddy black coffee. It was raining, because it was Ireland, and the bus broke down. We rented a car and drove the rest of the way, then watched the sunrise over North Bull Island. It was a grand time He loved the Beatles, Thai food, and Guinness."

"Yeah?"

"It was a couple of years ago, now."

"That's funny, because I once met my soulmate. Not in Ireland, though. She was nameless, for the time being, and was an artist on the outside. A very strange, avant garde one." He nodded resolutely, as if more certain of this one thing than anything else in the world. "Ironic, no? Maybe you two would be friends. But she seemed to have a heart for mission work, by her choices in purse-reading."

She hitched her bag higher up onto her shoulder, feeling exposed in a way that was ridiculous given her massive sweater and wool coat.

"I made her a peppermint latte every day for three weeks straight, except Sundays. We talked, finally, and I realized that she would probably kill me someday. It was a grand time. She loved C.S. Lewis, candy canes, and stalling kisses with awkward, generally irrelevant stories."

He was fighting a smile, trying to be serious, one eyebrow up in question.

"I think I'd hate her."

"Ah, probably. That's why you'll never meet."

"Excuse me. I really should be going."

"Are you busy later?"

"Do you have an extra ticket to _Hamilton_?"

"No, but I was thinking of getting married."

She smiled, and thought of her father and his kind brown eyes and thought that this boy with the strong jaw and gentle smile would probably be the sort of man he would tell her to look for.

"How do you feel about pharaohs?"

"Overwhelmingly dead, but they make for an invigorating game of hide and seek."

"And the Dread Pirate Roberts?"

"He'll most likely kill me in the morning."

She smiled then, a real, full-teeth smile, so hard that she felt like her cheeks would surely crack.

"Have you ever been to New Hampshire?"

"I'm from the Nantucket. I've absolutely no desire to see New Hampshire."

"Ah, well then I guess it's your house for Christmas dinner."


End file.
